While most Super Bowl viewers were concentrating on the Giants-Patriots final score, we were tallying up a different score — call it the #Hasthtag Bowl, if you want — and the final score was just as close as in the real game.

Based on my informal tracking, Twitter and Facebook shared equal visibility during the Super Bowl, being mentioned in eight commercials each. And both of them skunked Google+, which wasn’t mentioned at all during any Super Bowl ads.

Out of 59 total commercials — that’s my unofficial count beginning with kickoff and ending when time ran out in the fourth quarter, not including NBC/NFL promos nor the local ad breaks — the final tally, as shown above, is:

Twitter hashtags/mentions: 8
Facebook mentions: 8
Google+ mentions: 0

What was interesting to see was the timing of social mentions. The first two commercials of the game — for Bud Light and Audi — both included a Twitter hashtag as those companies aimed to catch early buzz before competitors, and/or before the game action took over the Twitter conversation. Meanwhile, there were no Facebook mentions in any of the commercials that aired during the first quarter. Conversely, only one commercial that aired after halftime — for Jack In The Box — used a Twitter hashtag.

The inclusion of hashtags seemed to work in almost every case, as the hashtag itself or the company that used it usually showed up pretty quickly in Twitter’s trending topics — like in this screenshot from the first quarter.

Facebook Super Bowl Commercial Mentions

Here are the Super Bowl commercials that mentioned Facebook:

Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax movie

The Avengers movie

Cars.com (showed Facebook logo)

Bud Light (halftime ad)

Pepsi-Max (not a Facebook URL, but PepsiMax.com/Facebook)

MetLife

Bud Light

Samsung Galaxy Note

Google+ Super Bowl Commercial Mentions

(This space left blank.)

Yes, Google+ was shut out. Zero mentions in any Super Bowl ads. Even though 77 of the top 100 brands have Google+ pages, not a single one was compelled to mention it on TV.

Postscript, February 6: Altimeter Group has done a similar comparison of Super Bowl ads, but with more detail than I used. They also looked at commercials shown in Chicago, where it’s likely that more national brands were buying even the local ad spots. Here’s the Altimeter data.

About The Author

Matt McGee is the Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. After leaving traditional media in the mid-1990s, he began developing and marketing websites and continued to provide consulting services for more than 15 years. His SEO and social media clients ranged from mom-and-pop small businesses to one of the Top 5 online retailers. Matt is a longtime speaker at marketing events around the U.S., including keynote and panelist roles. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. You can reach Matt via email using our Contact page.

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http://profile.yahoo.com/2ZJ5ZVVHYOQQN36QXSVIUUREBQ dza

Google really needs to implement friendly urls to the Google+ profiles. That’s one of the reasons companies don’t use those addresses on flyers, tv campaigns and so on. The Google+ profile url is way too big and looks quite strange.. no way you would post that on some printed stuff.

http://facebook.com/sociallycongruent Phyllis Khare

But think about it. It’s taken how many years for any of them to mention a social network at all! And Facebook is 8 years old. I bet their social media managers were trying to get G+ in the marketing, but probably got a lot of resistence to it. It’s hard enough to carve out precious time in a commercial to add those words (Facebook and Twitter), or give up screen space for them.

http://www.JosephHolguin.com j0seph

I saw these hashtags in the commercials and checked them out on twitter. I found that Bud Light had no twitter accounts that were interacting with the tweets for #MakeItPlatinum, so I made an account and started interacting with these tweets. I feel like this was a big missed opportunity, but they might have done this because they didn’t want to have the liability of interacting with people under the age of 21. You can see my blog post at http://bit.ly/wI9KAO

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